


renaissance

by That_Ghost_Kristoff



Series: into the desert [12]
Category: Star Wars - All Media Types
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Anakin Skywalker Doesn't Turn to the Dark Side, Culture Shock, F/M, Force Dyad (Star Wars), Gen, Post-Star Wars: Revenge of the Sith, Unreliable Narrator Anakin Skywalker
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-03-07
Updated: 2021-03-07
Packaged: 2021-03-13 10:42:21
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,056
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29899884
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/That_Ghost_Kristoff/pseuds/That_Ghost_Kristoff
Summary: Five years after the fall of the Republic, Anakin and Obi-Wan take a jaunt away from Tatooine with false names and a stolen ship.
Relationships: Obi-Wan Kenobi & Anakin Skywalker, Padmé Amidala/Anakin Skywalker (mentioned)
Series: into the desert [12]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/2135958
Comments: 7
Kudos: 56





	renaissance

**Author's Note:**

> This was not originally what I was going to post next, but after some of the comments on the previous fic, my co-author and I thought I should write/post this to clarify things. We’ve had up to the Sequel Trilogy planned for the past few months, so except for the occasional detail, we aren’t making this up fic by fic as we go along.  
> First, though, some things which were explicitly or implicity written into the last fic, but which still appears to have caused some confusion:  
> 1) Yoda manipulated Padmé into agreeing to separate the twins after a hard labour. Bail, who may be under the Emperor’s scrutiny (but frankly that’s also true in canon), offers to take Leia (explicitly in there, to be elaborated upon later).  
> 2) Yoda told Obi-Wan and Ahsoka that they and Anakin should separate as well, from each other and from Luke; they agreed and promptly did not follow instructions (explicit).  
> 3) Ahsoka and Obi-Wan were at that point unaware that Padmé agreed to separate the twins and Padmé was unaware about Yoda’s request to them/their reaction (implicit; implied by Ahsoka’s lack of knowledge about what happened with the twins).  
> 4) Literally everyone is angry, not just Owen (implicit and explicit).  
> This is a long series with many narrators, none of whom have the whole story at any given point, so they’re all unreliable and, ultimately, just deeply flawed people. Not all the information will come out immediately, but usually, it is in the text explicitly. Revealing everything upfront is not my preferred writing style. However, this one is more explanatory than I usually like, as it’s largely meant to give people an idea of what happened.  
> Nothing in this story is neatly fixed or particularly happy, as that’s not the purpose behind the series. After this fic, I do intend to write more about the Outer Rim Sieges before moving past the time in this one. The style of those will be more in line with my other stories.

At twenty-eight, Anakin Skywalker leaves home for the fourth time with a stolen starship and a false name. Through the viewport, he and Obi-Wan watch Tatooine shrink and shrink and shrink, just a half-tawny half-indigo ball dwarfed beside the suns, the western hemisphere aglow with reflective radiance but radiating no light itself—old gold bright, like some dead star. It’s just after midday down there in Mos Eisley, and early summer, if that place can ever have what another planet considers seasons. Anakin clutches so hard at the steering vane his fingers are white from circulation until finally, he rises high enough to circle safely over the suns and leave the sight of Tatooine behind. 

_ Breathe, _ he thinks. In, out.

Obi-Wan, with poorly disguised concern, says, “I’ll feel safer if you relax,” so Anakin does, releasing the tension in his arms and calves, his shoulders and his abdomen, his back. There’s a glare on the viewport from the sun, the stolen light freighter too schlocky to have a non-reflective coating over its transparisteel, forcing him to shut his eyes against the obstructive starshine to navigate for now from instinct and memory alone. “That,” Obi-Wan says, dry as a late afternoon wind, “does not, however, help.”

“You trust me,” Anakin says with the fleeting ghost of a smile, but opens his eyes again anyway to glance right at his travel companion. Between the glare and starship cabin’s artificial light, every grey strand in Obi-Wan’s hair and the threadbare stitching of homespun tunic is stark and obvious. There are new lines edged at the corners of his eyes and around his mouth when he smiles, but the desert hasn’t decimated him, or any of them, in a way it has so many others who spent their lives working towards their death in the heart of it.

He rolls his shoulders in complacent agreement, so his collar bones pop beneath his skin where the hemline doesn’t hide them. Neither of them, nor Ahsoka, regained the weight they lost in the War, but lost more; work on the Lars farm turned Padmé just as scrawny; Luke is less malnourished than Anakin was at almost five, but would be seen as too small for his age on Coruscant or Naboo or Alderaan. In the most recent flatholo of Leia that Bail sent along with the last flimsi letter, at least she looks normal. Or, Republic normal. Empire normal. Well, non-Tatooine normal, anyway.

Today they aren’t heading to Alderaan, though Anakin and Padmé had both hoped and, frankly, assumed that when eventually it was safe enough to risk leaving the planet, that would be their destination. It’s Leia’s birthday today, her fake one—their little girl, according to Bail, thinks she was born a full month before Empire Day. Their little girl, according to Bail, is also going to learn she’s adopted today. He said that in the first flimsi he managed to sneak to them, two years ago and not long before Luke’s equally fake birthday, which falls a fortnight from now. According to Bail, he and Breha would tell her when Leia was five. They would give her Anakin and Padmé’s names when she’s eight. Their real ones. Eventually, they’d all be able to meet, but no one selected an age for that yet. 

For their little girl’s sake, he and his wife don’t hate Bail. Thankfully, it’s easy enough to hate Yoda instead.

So today is Leia’s fifth birthday, she thinks, and in two weeks, it’s her brother’s, he thinks, but Anakin and Obi-Wan are off-planet, alone, in a stolen light freighter shaped like a Nubian scalefish without Padmé or Ahsoka, heading for Monsua Nebula. The smuggling route to Abbajj is out of fashion and infrequently trafficked, which is good enough for them, because it’s one month shy of five years since the Republic fell and the Empire rose, and somehow, the first person they’ve made reasonable contact with is  _ Hondo. _

“Hondo is not the first,” Obi-Wan says, yanking Anakin out from his own head. They started losing their boundaries during the Outer Rim Sieges, and the half-decade of near isolation on a moisture farm destroyed what few they had left, including unspoken rules about plucking impressions out from their bond. “Luke’s darling grandmother would be tragically offended.” 

When Anakin laughs, the worst of his tension finally bleeds from him. “Luke’s darling grandmother,” he says as the glare fades entirely from the centagonocal viewport’s upper left corner, “takes offense every time he calls her Nonna. Jobal’s going to kill us when she finds out Luke’s replaced her. You know, if she doesn’t kill us for the lying.”

“Jobal will survive the slight,” Obi-Wan says, waving his hand airily, “and Ventress is simply being prickly.” More seriously, he adds, “The Zuma sector isn’t far. We will return in time enough to avoid disappointing Luke.” 

“As long as Hondo doesn’t sell us out to the Empire.”

“Yes, as long as that.”

They ease into a rubbish field leftover from, presumably, some Empire capital ship’s pre-hyperspace trash compactor ejection, so a meandering scrap metal cluster throws a lopsided shadow through their stolen light freighter’s boxy cabin. There’s not a lot to this, just the cabin with all its multicoloured buttons and a ’fresher with a temperamental door and shallow storage spaces for rations or a change of clothes. He and Obi-Wan will be sleeping in their seats, like they had to back in the War when they were flying something other than the  _ Twilight.  _ If they’re lucky, Abbajj will have a couple of real beds they can kip on for their one overnight. Oh Force, maybe there will even be sanistreams with hot water. 

Ten days from now, Luke is turning five, Anakin thinks. Luke’s never had a sanistream with hot water. More than likely, his sister has never had to use sonic. 

In the last flatholo Bail sent, Leia had a grin startlingly like her mother’s and her brother’s, two long braids and snow in her hair, a cold-weather coat with fur lining the hood. She had a friend with her, another little girl with thick mittens and red curls. They had a puppy with them, some unrecognisable species that looked more like a no-tech mop than an animal. Together, they were halfway through constructing a snow figurine. The two girls were happy. What Anakin and his family mostly came away with, after seeing the image, was that Leia looked like she never missed a decent meal in her life. 

In the last flatholo Beru snapped of Luke, there was a smudge of grease below his eye from a day of learning how to fix a speeder with his dad and so much sand in his hair that it appeared brown. He was alone. There was a patch on his tunic sleeve and another on his trouser’s opposite knee, but the stitching was already fraying. Both were too big, because everyone knew it was a waste to dress younglings in clothes that fit them when soon enough, they’d grow. When Anakin cajoles him out of that tunic for his daily sonic shower, he can see the outline of his son’s every rib and vertebrae. 

On particularly bad days, he thinks that maybe, Luke should have gone with his sister. Padmé never says it, but he knows she thinks so sometimes too. At least the twins would be together, even if they would be without their parents.

After the stolen ship clears the rubbish field and the cold star it orbits, Anakin glances over his seat to R2 and tells him to prep the hyperdrive. “Get us as close to the nebula as you can,” he says, and trusts his friend to figure out the rest. R2 beeps a cheery affirmative.

“The twins are all right where they are,” Obi-Wan says as the stars stretch into blinding lines and with a hard jolt, they careen into the hyperlane. “Luke, we can protect,” he adds, and folds his arms as he presses his body into the back of his chair. “The Organas appear to be keeping Leia from the public eye.”

“I know,” Anakin says, because he does, but objective knowledge doesn’t make his fear or remorse any better. His terror for their safety and his guilt that Leia isn’t with them but also that Luke is growing up part-starved and half-wild on Tatooine. “We’re just—we just made a lot of noise and we’re talking about making more. He declared us all dead but that doesn’t mean he actually believes it.” 

“The four of us needn’t leave at the same time,” Obi-Wan says. “We’ve discussed this. The farm will always remain protected. What we’ve begun on Tatooine—if we’re successful here, then the movement can build upon itself.”

Again, Anakin says, “I know,” because really, he  _ does. _ The four of them kickstarting the slave rebellion in Mos Eisley wasn’t intentional, but he also can’t bring himself to regret that, at least. If Hondo makes good on this deal, then they should be able to arm the freed slaves, who from there can free others. At the time, Anakin thought,  _ It’s more than the Jedi ever did,  _ because he knew that, too.

When Obi-Wan caught the impression of the thought, in the moment that they crouched behind the overflowing food waste bins of the local hostel’s cantina and the city streets swelled in violent rage around them, he squirmed, but only because he knew Anakin was right. It didn’t take their odd dyad or even an ordinary Force bond for Obi-Wan to know how Anakin felt or vice versa. Ahsoka and Padmé knew it. Owen and Beru, of course, never would have had the context.

“Think they’ll all survive for a week alone?” Anakin asks, staring at without seeing the pulsating blue tunnel that envelopes them so he doesn’t need to look at Obi-Wan. Their reflections block the sight, both watery and indistinct. Featureless, mostly, but coloured. After five years under Tatooine’s unforgiving suns, Anakin’s hair is the same yellow as it was when he was young, but still has none of the straightness. His tan is back. At least he doesn’t need protective anti-burn lotion, which is expensive and stinks too strongly of off-world woodcuttings. They routinely need to buy it for the others. For Ahsoka, whose lekku and montails are more sensitive than human skin, it barely works.

Frowning, Obi-Wan says, “It’s not much better with us there,” which is true enough. Interpersonal friction around the farm had started to calm for awhile, after that first year, until Ahsoka and Anakin casually mentioned their plans to help the Rebellion in front of Owen, but even before then, there’s never been a point when they managed to fit together. 

After that first morning—the morning when Anakin woke to the sun and the heat and the sand and _knew,_ in the way he would always know, that he was back on Tatooine, because he has his homeworld coded into his DNA—the residents of the moisture farm formed two groups with him playing inadequate peacekeeper while his son got caught in the middle. His stepbrother and his wife didn’t care much about Anakin as his own person, which he understood, but as an extension of his mother’s memory, because she raised _Owen_ even if she didn’t raise her own son. But it was different with Luke. None of them knew that Beru had fertility issues or that she and Owen had been trying for their own child for years; Beru and Padmé fought over every childrearing decision from the style of papoose to how long the mother should breastfeed while Anakin and the rest fought with Owen over their intention to train Luke in the Force when he was old enough. Beru left the room for Luke’s first word. He called Padmé _Mama._ _Papa_ came next, and _Nonno_ after that, because she was teaching him the Naboo dialect. It took awhile before Luke managed Basic’s _auntie_ or _uncle._

At least they weren’t around for his first step. It was in the early morning courtyard, during one of those rare days of full fog, and he teetered right into Anakin’s arms. 

Owen passively didn’t fight with Obi-Wan and Ahsoka over who could more accurately be called the Skywalkers-Naberrie’s family for a full year; Anakin and Padmé passively didn’t fight about Leia for a full month, just like he actively fought with Obi-Wan, once, over the decision to call them Eisley. Even five years later, everyone still expects Anakin, as the native Tatooinian, to bridge cultural gaps, but his experience is almost as removed from the Lars’ as it is from his wife’s. They both know about the suns and the sands and the heat and what lurks in the ground beneath their feet, but even their childhood fairy tales are different. 

That’s not to say that it’s all bad. At least twice a month, Padmé and Beru set aside the not-fight to have a “girl’s night” with Ahsoka, who Beru mistakenly sees as “sweet,” just like she mistakenly believes Obi-Wan is “nice,” and Owen appropriately realised that Padmé is awe-inspiring after he saw her shoot a scurrier in the eye from forty paces. They both like Anakin well enough and he them. He and Padmé learned what it means to be married, openly and all the time, with a son and extended family, and he and the others learned to adapt to the post-Republic world. Daily, at dawn or in the dead of night, he opens his eyes to the sight of his wife, and spends the daytime hours working hard beside his family. To have that after everything is to count himself lucky, he tells himself.

What he does and does not miss from his life before the Republic fell is a haphazard assortment of people and places: Padmé’s Coruscanti apartment and the lakeside estate in Varykino, Rex and the 501st, the Room of One Thousand Fountains, Aayla, Plo Koon, Cody, Dex’s Diner, the illegal podracing rings in the Galactic City’s underworld. His old rooms with Obi-Wan. The freedom to travel, to fly. Rain. Watching the seasons change. 

He misses being Anakin Skywalker. 

Just to break the silence, he says, “Padmé and ’Soka are really advocating for a dune marten for Luke’s present,” in Ani Eisely’s decidedly Tatooinian accent, the one that he never lost on Coruscant but that gradually strengthened after his return home. He bends his knee to rest his foot on the chair and loops his arm loosely around his leg. “They said if he’s old enough to start learning about the Force this year, he’s old enough to have a pet.”

“It should be a sand cat,” Obi-Wan says with real conviction. “At least those are useful.”

“That’s what I said,” Anakin tells him. He and Padmé were still discussing it as she helped him load the secondary speeder, the one they left with Peli Motto, the only mechanic in Mos Eisley worth trusting with a secret. “She argued that a sand cat will take away from Ahsoka’s main food supply, like she hasn’t started hunting down the womp rats. Did you hear Luke asking her if he could go along last week? To hunt womp rats?”

“Yes,” the other man says, and grimaces appropriately. “He has taken on his parents’ desire for rather disastrous misadventure.” 

“Womp rats are evil,” Anakin says, scrunching his nose. “Sith-spawned nightmares pretending to be rodents. My son’s not going anywhere near them ’til he can shoot a blaster—hey, don’t give me that ‘uncivilised’ line. Using a lightsaber on them is just a waste of decent weaponry.”

“You’re rather passionate about the matter.”

“Yeah, well, did I ever tell you about the time one attacked me as a kid?”

Apparently, he hasn’t, so entertains Obi-Wan with the story of his first kill, the victim a vicious womp rat with yellowed fangs and dried blood matted in the fur around its snout that jumped him during his self-appointed mission to jailbreak his friends and a pack of Ghostlings out from the Mos Espa Grand Arena. “I used a drill’s plasma beam,” Anakin finishes, grinning. “Basically turned it into a lightsaber. They can carry off younglings, easy.” 

“And yet,” Obi-Wan says, swiveling the chair sideways to face him, “they’re not the most horrid creature Tatooine has on offer for its residents. I do hope to never encounter a krayt dragon again in my lifetime. No, Ani. It was  _ not  _ funny.”

“It was a little funny,” Anakin says, and stretches, cracking his spine at the movement. They train as often as they can, he and Obi-Wan and Ahsoka and usually Padmé as well, but this is the longest that he’s sat still and upright in a chair in years. “We had bets on which one of you were going to have nightmares. Beru and Owen were convinced it’d be Padmé. I tried to tell them it’d be you, but—”

“They spit acid,” his friend says, acidily. “It was a perfectly reasonable reaction.”

“Yeah, yeah,” he says, and slips from the chair to pace. “I forgot how fucking cold it is out here.” 

There are goosebumps on the bare skin of his flesh hand and a chill trapped where his real arm meets his prosthetic. Obi-Wan’s shivered more than once, reacting to the vacuum’s temperature as severely as any native Tatooinian would. When he suggests they search the storage shelves for blankets, Anakin doesn’t protest. They stole this light freighter from a trader of something or other that was at least semi-legitimate, because there are no smuggling hatches. Ventress gifted them the tip of where to find it unguarded and unoccupied, but no particular details on its owner. She was in the cantina when they reached Mos Eisley, back on-planet to weasel out another off-the-grid job from her contact in the local branch of the Guild, and, she said, the owner of this particular vessel was a right son of a nerf-herder who tried to get his hand up another woman’s skirt. 

Having regular contact with Asajj Ventress, the erstwhile Dark Jedi and Count Dooku’s favoured apprentice, was not what Anakin expected out of his life. He and Ahsoka met her by accident or fate in that same cantina before Luke was even one, chit-chatting with a Rodian bounty hunter about the merits of Sunsets over Ardees in a shadowy corner booth while the Bith performers tooted out a boring tune on their kloo horns. Eight months earlier, they probably would have attacked each other as a point of pride, but they were so relieved to see another Force-user alive and surviving that Ahsoka positively beamed. It helped that Ventress was on amicable terms with Obi-Wan before the world fell apart, and that Anakin knew it.

Inevitably, Owen and Beru weren’t happy when Obi-Wan dragged Ventress to the farm not long after Luke’s second birthday. She’d been injured in the city and needed somewhere to heal. They hadn’t anticipated him to adore her. 

Then again, Luke adores just about everyone, even fucking Darklighter, the local land baron. Maybe Leia has the same disposition, or maybe not. Her brother certainly didn’t get it from their parents, nor their grandparents, biological or others. It must be Beru’s influence, because it definitely wasn’t from Auntie ’Soka or Uncle Owen, either.

The Jedi always preached compassion, but watching how Luke is, how he’s willing at such a young age to extend a hand and offer help or friendship to anyone and anything, proves just how little the Order knew about anything. 

Anakin doesn’t miss the Order. He misses the members, but not the institution. Not the politics nor the dogmatic insistence that their doctrines were the only form of truth. In the years leading to the Empire’s rise, he broke almost every rule the Jedi had and did not, in the end, surrender to the Dark Side, as Master Yoda thought he would, nor kill the Sith Lord, like Master Qui-Gon had hoped. 

Still. He may not have fallen, but he smoothed Palpatine’s path to successfully ripping the memory of the Jedi out of the galaxy when he collapsed the Temple. He doesn’t remember that last night on Coruscant well, other than sharp pain and Ahsoka screaming for him, for Rex, for anyone. The few weeks leading to it are hardly clearer. He returned to the city from the Yerbana campaign with Obi-Wan at his side and Count Dooku in their custody, his body still buzzing from a stimshot and a painkiller he injected just to get him through that farce of a rescue mission. Even after the last of the drugs left his system, he barely slept, hopped up on the nightmare visions of his wife dying in childbirth and his ever-present anxiety over how routinely his “special assignment” set him in the same room as the Chancellor. It was almost a year earlier, after Cad Bane’s failed assassination attempt, when the Council said, “You must be our eyes, Young Skywalker,” but it wasn’t until Anakin’s return from the Outer Rim Sieges that the mission turned from passive to active.

It was worse after Obi-Wan left for Utapau. Obi-Wan discovered the word “dyad” in the archives when searching for an explanation for what was different about their bond after the excursion on the unnamed planet, then received the new assignment eighteen hours later, like some sort of punishment for getting too attached. “Anakin and I will leave tonight,” he told the Council during the meeting, the same meeting where Anakin had to admit that the Chancellor essentially demanded they  _ make  _ him a Master with a seat, in spite of the rules about first training a padawan to knighthood, and then the Council promptly informed Obi-Wan that no, he would be going alone, and no, he was not allowed to argue. He didn’t argue. Neither did Anakin. They went their separate ways, and six weeks later, the Chancellor casually revealed to Anakin he was a Sith Lord and the on-planet Council members not-so-casually died on the floor of his office. In another life, maybe Palpatine’s suggestion that he could save Padmé’s life would have been enough to convince Anakin to renounce his few morals, but in this one, he’d already resurrected someone once. He figured he could do it again. 

Then Ahsoka and the 501st returned, and the 501st turned on them, and all around the galaxy, everyone  _ died. _

But not them. Ahsoka, Obi-Wan, Padmé, Anakin. Luke and Leia. Anakin hasn’t fulfilled anyone’s expectations, good or bad, but he and his family have survived. That has to be enough for now—or at least, until they join with the Rebellion to kill the Emperor and can finally, finally relocate to Naboo. To Varykino, where the glacial lake is a perfect mirror for its perfect sky and the landscape is so alive that it’s better than a daydream. Whether Owen and Beru join them is their decision, but it won’t stop the rest of them from leaving Tatooine for good. 

Eventually, Obi-Wan discovers a long, skinny locker that pops open after a thump with his fist, from which spills a host of scratchy blankets and synthwool pillows that inflate if they press the right button. They create what might generously be considered a nest on the floor against the back wall below the harsh overhead glowpanels and beside R2, who chirps happily in favour of their company. Anakin rests his head against the metal and stares forward, taking in the empty chairs and control panel and streaming, swirling blue of hyperspace beyond the viewport. A small, sneaky, shameful part of him admits that he  _ missed _ this—missed spending extended time on cold, hard floors with Obi-Wan, or Obi-Wan and Ahsoka, as a starship coasted on quasi-autopilot through a major hyperlane. As much as he loves his family, a classification that does extend to the man his mother raised and his wife, Anakin’s hatred of Tatooine is also coded thoroughly inside of the make-up of his person, so the knowledge that he needs to return there has his heartbeat out of rhythm and his head unsteady. He doesn’t regret that, however accidentally, he shorted a Mos Eisley slaver’s entire collection of detonators where they waited in a locked travelling storage after he saw the man whip a youngling, nor that this led to hopefully the first rebellion of many, just like he doesn’t regret the time he’s had with his son and his wife and his sister and his father, nor that while biologically, the latter two designations are inaccurate, the last five years allowed the labels to become fact. But he regrets their separation from his daughter, and he regrets his culpability in the Republic’s fall. He regrets that where that landed his family is fucking Tatooine. 

Nineteen years ago, he stepped off a starship with Master Qui-Gon, Obi-Wan, and his future wife, and into a forest. There was daybreak mist in a canopy of vibrant leaves, grass growing past his knees, creepers leeching health from the trees, and moss beneath his feet so wet and spongy that the water soaked through the flimsi-thin soles of his too-big sandals. All around them was early morning birdsong, and the air smelled wet with springtime growth. He connected with the Force in a way he never had before, so intensely it left him dizzy, and despite how raw the loss of his mother still was, he already told himself that he was never going back. Let Master Qui-Gon do whatever he wanted, Little Ani thought upon that first impression, if it meant he never had to lose all this water and life. 

Then he moved to Coruscant. 

“Did you mean it,” he says suddenly, without moving his gaze from the beautiful familiarity of the hyperlane’s fluid motion, “when you said we should start working with the Rebellion off-world?”

For a long moment, Obi-Wan is quiet, until he asks, “Were you genuine in your agreement that we should?”

“Yes,” Anakin answers without hesitation, or even a small amount of guilt. “So were Padmé and Ahsoka.” 

It’s not shocking. Though the others are wrong, they also feel some responsibility for the Empire’s rise. Padmé confessed as much, and the constant shame reaches through his Force bonds. Or at least, for Anakin, that’s what he tells himself is the reason for his longing to run away for snatches at a time. The same small, horrible part of himself where he locks all his unwanted thoughts—the part the Dark Side peeled out into the open during his two nights on the unnamed planet in Wild Space—knows the truth: that he is back on  _ fucking _ Tatooine, playacting as a moisture farmer and a mechanic, when what he misses is making a difference in a movement bigger than himself. He hated the War. He misses it. 

Padmé understands about the need to belong to something better. As ex-Jedi themselves, so do Ahsoka and Obi-Wan. Owen and Beru do not. 

They fought about it just a few days ago, he and Ahsoka against Owen. His stepbrother, who came to join them for the usual midday break in the shade of the vaporator when the suns were striking the sands with so much anger that all the animals had retreated into hiding, caught Ahsoka saying, “Well, one of us has got to stay here, obviously. Us, I mean. So, not including Padmé,” and Anakin answering, “I’m not saying you’re wrong, but don’t let her hear that.” 

Owen, slick with sweat beneath his tunic and ill-tempered from a morning in the suns, demanded to know what they were discussing. They told him. Their tempers were just as short after just as long in the heat. He said, “You can’t just abandon Luke, Ani,” so Anakin said, “Who said anything about abandonment?” and Ahsoka snapped, “It’s important to make the world safe for them,” as she unconsciously and unsuccessfully tried to rub away crusted dirt from her neck. 

So his stepbrother said, “Yeah, them,” and, “Just following the Jedi way, aren’t you?” 

Anakin walked away until he calmed down. Generally speaking, it was a good idea to avoid creating yet another sandstorm. 

Though he and Obi-Wan pass a full night in hyperspace, neither sleep, drifting instead in and out of conversation about the future or the past. Around Tatooine’s third hour, when they hit a lull in musing over, again, if Hondo will sell them out to the Empire, Anakin asks, “Think Dooku actually survived ’til Empire Day?”

“No,” Obi-Wan says, and runs his hand over his stubble so it scratches audibly. He hasn’t had a beard since he remembered Anakin’s nine-year-old mites, though it’s less common to attract those on a farm than in a city’s slave quarters. “Palpatine crafted a rather elaborate plan to rid himself of the man after all.”

“Yeah,” he says, scowling, “he did.”

“That was, perhaps,” Obi-Wan says with an early hours’ wistfulness, “our most terrifying crash landing to date.”

“Seriously?” Anakin says. “I guess I’ve got to try harder.”

Quirking a brow, the other man says, “Are you aware that my every grey hair is your personal fault?”

He shakes his head and smiles ruefully. “Sure, Dad,” he says, and shifts the conversation into the likelihood of Hondo drafting them into some illicit spice deal as a formal initiation into the criminal life. 

Just before the sixth hour, they drop from hyperspace near the nebula. “Ready?” Anakin asks as he steers them around the wreckage of a ship predating the Clone Wars. Though it’s been years, a weak emergency signal continuously pleads for aid with its transmission capacity too shot to connect to other starships even as the residual auxiliary power maintains the red glow that brightens then dims in the usual, uneven coded sequence. The body of the pilot is gone.

They ignore the sight. Obi-Wan says, “Only if you insist,” and sighs as Anakin drops them into the roving interstellar cloud. There’s guilt still thrumming in blood for all that he did and all that he wants, and a simmering anxiety over leaving his family behind, but as the crimson mixture of dust, ionised gases, hydrogen, and helium engulfs them, he finds himself breathing easily for the first time in five years.


End file.
